{ Monthly Archives } December 2013

On Christmas Day, all of the museums and most of the sites were closed – the drawback of going on holiday over Christmas in a Christian country! The group went for a long and rather tiring walk around Thessaloniki – we visited a few historically interesting very early Byzantine churches in the morning, nipping into […]

31 12 2013GillianDay outComments Off on Scattering the Ashes on Christmas Day

I find Christmas a very difficult time of the year, and I really don’t want to spend Christmas Day moping about the house on my own. So I was determined to go away again this year. I was feeling a bit less anti-social than I have for the past two years, so decided to join […]

When we moved into our Victorian cottage fifteen years ago or so, it needed complete refurbishment – re-wiring, re-carpeting, and decorating inside and out. But of course we didn’t have enough money to do the complete job, so the more urgent jobs got done first, with the rest following over the years as and when […]

This week I went from one end of the Malvern pub-grub scale to the other. The pubs for my recent meals with my friends were chosen to have good food, and an atmosphere conducive to a good chat over a few drinks. In contrast, on Wednesday it was the work Christmas Lunch, for the whole […]

I’ve been doing a fair amount of catching-up recently with friends, mostly ex-colleagues, over a meal, which has been very enjoyable. First, I met up with a group I used to work with a number of years ago, who have all left the company to join a spin-out which they set up on the science […]

You know the parties you sometimes read about in the newspapers? The ones where some naïve teenager advertises it on Facebook, loads of strangers turn up, get drunk and noisily trash the house? Well, I think that’s what the mice were doing last night! There was most definitely a riotous party going on directly above […]

I’ve been noticing a fair few very dozy flies in my kitchen this week. It’s far too late in the year for them to be happy, as the temperatures are too cold for them. They are so slow that it’s easy to swat them, but it’s still not pleasant. I think they are another sign […]

I really ought to know better than to state publicly that the mice are dead – and in the case of the one above the larder, very obviously dead. At 11pm last night, just as I was trying to get to sleep, I heard the unmistakable patter of tiny feet in the cavity wall behind […]